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THE 



POLITICAL CMSIS OF l»i)i, 



\ REPLY TO Mil. BLAlNEi 



BY 



GJUKlSTdPHEB STU:aRT rXTTBRS()K. 



1884. 






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t i 



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„.:-.,j 



THE 



POLITICAL CRISIS OF 186L 



A RtPLY TO MR. BLAINE, 



BY 



CHRISTOPHER STUART PATTERSON. 



H^ 




PHILADELPHIA : 

PORTER & COATES. 

1884. 







Printed by 

Allen, Lane & Scott, 

Philadelphia. 



The published chapter of Mr. Blaine's book deals 
with that crisis in the history of the country which 
culminated in civil war. The distinguishing char- 
acteristic of Mr. Blaine's literary workmanship is in 
his directness of appeal to his reader's sympathies 
and prejudices. His point of view is that of the 
advocate and not that of the judge, and that portion 
of his book Avhich has been given to the public is a 
printed oration and not an historical essay. Yet 
were his subject less important, and were his style 
less attractive, his words would command attention, 
because of popular appreciation of the brilliant cer- 
tainties of his past, and popular interest in the still 
more brilliant possibilities of his future. 

Mr. Blaine's conclusion is that Mr. Buchanan could, 
by prompt and vigorous action, have suppressed the 
rebellion, and changed the course of history ; and he 
necessarily bases this conclusion upon the assumption 
that the lawful exercise of executive authority would 
have crushed the revolt in its incipiency. That as- 
sumption involves a misapprehension of the relative 
powers of the legislative and executive departments 
of the government of the United States, a misunder- 
standing of the actual condition of public affairs in 
the latter part of 1860 and early part of 1861, and 
an inadequate appreciation of Mr. Buchanan's clear- 
ness of perception and earnestness of purpose. 

(3) 



Mr. Blaine does no more than justice to the purity, 
he does less than justice to the strength, of Mr. 
Buchanan's character. Stripped of all rhetorical 
forms of expression, and plainly stated, his estimate 
of Mr. Buchanan is, that he was a conscientious but 
timid man, who was habitually influenced by the 
stronger minds of those with whom he came in con- 
tact. It is true that this estimate differs from 
that which was for a long time the popular impres- 
sion of Mr. Buchanan's character, only in that it gives 
him credit for integrity of purpose ; yet a careful 
study of the actual condition of public affairs in 1860 
and 18G1, and a dispassionate view of the difficulties 
which beset Mr. Buchanan's administration in its clos- 
ing days, ought to convince any one that Mr. Bu- 
chanan is entitled to a higher measure of considera- 
tion than that which Mr. Blaine has accorded to him. 

Fortunately the materials for the formation of an 
accurate judgment with regard to the policy and the 
action of Mr. Buchanan's administration are within 
the reach of every man, for those materials are to 
be found, not only in the journals of Congress, 
in the Presidential messages and other State papers 
of the day, in Mr. Buchanan's published account of 
his administration, and in the memoirs and letters of 
other active participants in the great events of that 
time, but also in those lately j)ublished volumes in 
which Mr. George Ticknor Curtis has, with historical 
accuracy, with adequate fullness of detail, and with a 
judicial impartiality, as admirable as it is rare among 



biographers, told the story of Mr. Buchanan's life. 
He who considers and weighs this mass of evidence 
will not fail to conclude that the Mr. Buchanan of his- 
tory is a very different person from the timid old man, 
honest but infirm of purpose, and devoid of moral 
vertebrse, that Mr. Blaine's canvas presents to us. 
Mr. Buchanan came of that Scotch-Irish stock, 
which, combining in varying proportions the persever- 
ance, caution, and self-reliance of the Scottish, and the 
enthusiasm, sympathy, and unselfishness of the Irish 
character, has given to England many of her great 
soldiers and statesmen, and has furnished to the 
United States no inconsiderable proportion of the 
brain as well as of the bone and sinew of its popula- 
tion. Called to the bar in 1812, he had rapidly 
achieved distinction, and his professional success was 
attested by the entries in his fee book, by the char- 
acter of the causes in which he was retained, and by 
his successful advocacy of those causes. In public 
life he had won, in speedy succession, the little and 
the great prizes of political ambition. After a term 
of preliminary service in the lower House of the 
Legislature of Pennsylvania, he had been from 1821 
to 1831 a representative in Congress; from 1831 
to 1833 minister to the court of St. Petersburg; 
from 1834 to 1845 a Senator of the United States; 
from 1845 to 1849 the Secretary of State in the 
Cabinet of President Polk; and from 1853 to 1856 
minister to England. In 1856 he had been selected 
as the standard-bearer of his party, because he was 



universally recognized as the ablest representative of 
that party's principles, and in 1857 he became the 
President of the United States. 

In Congress Mr. Buchanan studied the subject of 
discussion with the same care with which he pre- 
pared his cases at the bar. He almost always spoke 
at the latest possible stage of the debate, thus en- 
abling himself to take advantage of the errors and 
omissions of previous speakers, and his reported 
speeches are well reasoned arguments from which 
nothing is omitted which could serve to explain and 
vindicate the view he advocated. Year after year he 
joined issue in debate with Webster, Clay, Clayton, 
and the many other able men who were the consistent 
opponents of Democratic doctrines. With them he 
discussed great questions upon broad grounds, of con- 
stitutional authority and political expediency, and he 
maintained the independence of his judgment against 
their persuasive reasoning. In the Cabinet, and at 
the courts of Russia and of England, he was called to 
shape and to present the national policy as affecting 
the relations of the country to foreign states ; he 
negotiated a commercial treaty at St. Petersburg; he 
stated with precision and maintained with firmness 
the position of the United States with regard to its 
north-Avestern boundary ; in the complications grow- 
ing out of the misconstruction of the Clayton-Bulwer 
treaty, he asserted the Monroe doctrine in relation to 
South American affairs with a vigour that might well 
command the sympathy and challenge the admiration 



of Mr. Blaine; and by the discovery that "the simple 
dress of an American citizen " is the ordinary even- 
ing attire of a gentleman with the addition of a 
sword, he, while doubtless laughing in his sleeve, ac- 
complished, with a more than diplomatic gravity, the 
pacific settlement of that momentous controversy as 
to the proper garb of a Republican representative ac- 
credited to a monarchical court, which Mr. Secretary 
Marcy had provoked as the first step in a sartorial 
propaganda of Democratic doctrines. No one, who 
fails to study the dispatches which Mr. Buchanan 
wrote when Secretary of State and Minister to Eng- 
land, can do full justice to his ability, for in modera- 
tion of tone, in clearness of statement, and in logical 
accuracy of reasoning, they are models of diplomatic 
communication. 

Yet Mr. Buchanan could not claim to rival Horace 
Walpole or Lord Chesterfield as a letter writer. 
Few readers of the many and lengthy letters which 
Mr. Curtis prints will be likely to concur in the 
biographer's approval of their literary merits. Mr. 
Buchanan in private intercourse wrote too often, too 
rapidly, and too carelessly to write well. Many as 
are the letters which Mr. Curtis prints, they con- 
stitute but a small part of Mr. Buchanan's episto- 
lary efforts. No more voluminous letter writer ever 
lived. Mr. Curtis does not state it, but it is a fact 
well known to those who were Mr. Buchanan's po- 
litical associates and adherents, that one means by 
which he created and increased his influence in his 



8 

party, was by the writing of private letters, not 
only to leaders in national, state, or municipal poli- 
tics, but also to politicians of lesser note. Those 
letters flattered the recipients, and, passing from hand 
to hand, they made Mr. Buchanan's name a house- 
hold word throughout the country. The man, whose 
ambition nerved him to devote hours of every work- 
ing-day to the writing of such practical epistles, had 
no time to waste on the graces of style, the refine- 
ments of sentiment, or humorous turns of expression. 
Mr. Buchanan had entered public life as a mem- 
ber of the Democratic party ; to its favour he owed 
all the offices he held ; and by its votes he was placed 
in the Presidency. For the greater part of seventy 
years that party had controlled the government of the 
United States. It had maintained against the cen- 
tralizing tendencies of the Federal party, the reserved 
rights of the States, and the paramount necessity of 
a strict construction of the Constitution ; it had op- 
posed the appropriation of the public money to works 
of internal improvement; it had resisted the estab- 
lishment of a national bank, the emission of a paper 
currency, and the imposition of any tariff which should 
fail to afford equal protection to every section of the 
Union; it had vigorously prosecuted the war of 1812 
with England and the war of 1847 with Mexico; in 
1832 it had suppressed rebellion in South Carolina by 
the prompt assertion of the supremacy of the Federal 
Government; it had at all times in its history con- 
sistently asserted the exemption of slavery in the 



9 



States from federal interference, and the obligation 
of the Northern States to surrender fugitive slaves ; 
and in 1860, broken into discordant factions by ir- 
reconcilable differences of opinion upon the question 
of slavery in the Territories, it was driven from 
power, and Mr. Buchanan, charged with the admin- 
istration of the government, and supported only by 
a disorganized and defeated party, was confronted by 
a rebellion, whose leaders had been his political allies 
and his personal friends. 

That rebellion was not a sudden outburst of pop- 
ular fury, but it was the inevitable result of causes 
that were slow of growth, yet certain of operation. 
At the close of the war of the Revolution, the thir- 
teen colonies which had successfully asserted their 
independence, did not constitute a homogeneous na- 
tion. The nearest settlements of those scantily popu- 
lated States were then separated from each other by 
distances, whose effect in retarding or preventing 
communication can with difficulty be realized in 
these days of railways, telegraphs, newspapers, and 
hourly mails. But, widely separated as they were in 
distance and in time, they were still more widely 
separated by differences in the sources and manner 
of their original settlement, and in the character of 
their institutions, and of all those differences the most 
important were those that found their last expression 
in the essential antagonism of slavery to free insti- 
tutions. 

Slaves had- been imported into the colonies under 



10 

British rule, and, at the end of the war of Indepen- 
dence, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, the two Caroli- 
nas, and Georgia had a slave population of more than 
half a million, while Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New 
York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, and 
Rhode Island were slave States only in name. Their 
climate, then temperate in summer and very cold in 
winter, permitted the employment of white men in 
the fields, and slave labour being brought into compe- 
tition with free labour was, as it always will be, dis- 
covered to be less economical. Under the teaching of 
self-interest, those States were soon permeated by a 
realizing sense of the evils of slavery, which found 
practical expression in the more or less gradual eman- 
cipation of all the slaves within the limits of their 
jurisdiction. While an intelligent appreciation of the 
necessary evils of slavery was then so far from being 
peculiar to the Northern States that many Southern 
statesmen were outspoken abolitionists, yet so large a 
relative proportion of the wealth of the South was in- 
vested in slave property, and slave labour was so gen- 
erally regarded in the South as essential to the cul- 
tivation of rice, indigo, and tobacco, that, even under 
the confederation, the States had ranged themselves 
under the opposing banners of freedom and slavery. 
The confederation in which the colonies had united 
on the successful issue of the war of independence 
was soon found to be a rope of sand, and, in the 
words of the preamble to the Constitution of the 
United States, it became necessary " in order to form 



11 

e. more perfect union, establish justice, insure do- 
mestic tranquillity, provide for the common defence, 
promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings 
of liberty," that for the confederation of States, 
there should be substituted an union of the people 
of the United States under a federal government, 
which though limited in its action by the reservation 
to the several States of all powers not in express 
terms delegated to the United States, should yet be 
supreme within its defined bounds. 

The union under one federal government of States 
whose laws sanctioned, with States whose laws for- 
bade, slavery rendered it essential to the conservation 
of slavery, that its status should be recognized by the 
federal constitution as that of a domestic institution 
of the States exempted from federal interference, that 
the extradition of fugitive slaves should be imposed 
as a duty binding upon the free States, and that the 
balance of power, as between the free and the slave 
States, should be so constituted and so maintained 
that no subsequent alteration of the terms of union 
should impair the security of slavery. The Consti- 
tution was formed upon these principles. The North 
and the South each gained all the advantages that 
were to be derived from the union, but the South 
gained also the recognition of slavery as a subject 
of State and not of national regulation; the admis- 
sion of the right to reclaim fugitive slaves ; the post- 
ponement until 1808 of the prohibition of the slave 
trade ; the limitation to ten dollars per capita of the 



12 

customs duty upon imported slaves; the concession 
that in the computation of the population for the pur- 
pose of representation in the popular branch of the 
national legislature, three-fifths of the whole number 
of slaves in each State should be added to the num- 
ber of free men of that State ; and the equality of 
representation of the States in the Senate of the 
United States. The effect of these constitutional 
guaranties was not only to protect slavery from 
federal interference under the Constitution as then 
framed, but also to forbid any amendment of that 
Constitution in the interest of abolition, so long as 
the slave States constituted more than one-fourth 
of the whole number of States. Thenceforward 
slavery in the States was legally unassailable by 
either the Federal Government or the free States. 

Yet, here and there, throughout the North, there 
came together earnest men and women, who saw so 
vividly the inherent wrong of slavery, that they 
hungered and thirsted for its destruction; and, alike 
unmindful of the protection which the Constitution 
had thrown around the thing they hated, of their 
duty as citizens to respect that legal immunity, and 
of the practical effect of their action in uniting the 
people of the Southern States in the defence of 
slavery, they began and continued, by written and 
by spoken words, an aggressive political campaign for 
its abolition. It is true that that agitation destroyed 
that which, in 1832, seemed to be the fair promise of 
voluntary abolition in Virginia, and it is also true 



that the same cause, at a later day, postponed aboh- 
tion in the District of Columbia ; but it is equally 
true that every attempt by a Southern man to reclaim 
his fugitive slave and forcibly carry him back from 
freedom into slavery; every effort by the South 
to aggrandize slavery by the admission of new slave 
States ; and every endeavour, upon the part of North- 
ern conservatives, to suppress the abolitionists by 
social and political proscription, only added fresh 
fuel to the flames of agitation. 

As we read the history of the United States, 
from 1787 to 1860, as war has since recorded it in 
letters of fire and blood, we can see clearly that 
there never was a day in all those years when it 
would not have been, in those who then led public 
opinion, the highest duty of statesmanship to secure, 
at whatever cost in money, the voluntary abolition 
of slavery, and thus to have ended in peace the 
irreconcilable conflict of opinion between those who 
could see only the barbarity, the cruelty, and the 
individual and national demoralization of slavery, and 
those others who could see only its constitutional 
recognition and legal immunity. In 1828 one North- 
ern man at least, who had no sympathy with slavery, 
saw clearly that which was at one and the same time 
the path of duty and of national self-interest. Dr. 
William Ellery Channing,* in that year wrote to 



*■ The letter is referred to by Mr. Curtis in the second volume of his life 
of Mr. Buchanan, page 296, and is printed in full in Mr. Webster's works, 
vol. v., page 367. 



14 



Mr Webster, "It seems to me that, before moving 
in this matter, we ought to say to them" (the 
Southern States) "distinctly, 'we consider slavery 
as your calamity, not your crime, and we will 
share with you the burden of putting an end to 
it We will consent that the public lands shall be 
appropriated to this object; or that the general govern- 
ment shall be clothed with power to apply a portion 

, ., J * * * We must first 

of revenue to it. 

let the Southern States see that we are their friends 
in this affair; that we sympathize with them, and, 
from principles of patriotism and philanthropy, are 
willing to share the toil and expense of abolishmg 
slavery, or I fear our interference will avail noth- 

. V * * * * * * 

mg. 

"My fear in regard to our efforts against slavery is, 

that we shall make the case worse by rousing sec- 
tional pride and passion for its support, and that we 
shall only break the country into two great parties, 
which may shake the foundations of government." 
But Dr. Channing's wise counsels did not prevaU, 
for not until the light of battle shone in men's faces 
did the country realize that slavery had been at all 
times a standing menace to its peace; nor, in the 
days of restricted national expenditure which pre- 
ceded the war, could any party, even if the public 
conscience had been awakened, and if the South had 
voluntarily accepted emancipation, have gone to the 
country with any hope of success upon the issue of 
a national appropriation for the liberation of slaves. 



15 

Therefore it was that efforts were made, from time 
to time, by successive compromises, to remove the 
slavery question from the range of political discus- 
sion, but each compromise in its turn, though at the 
time accepted as a finality, failed of accomplishing 
its desired end, because of its inability to destroy 
the irritating cause, and because of its essential in- 
applicability to changed circumstances and condi- 
tions. In truth, the conflict between freedom and 
slavery was, as Mr. Seward said, irrepressible. On 
the one side was the North, with its diversified in- 
terests and industries, and with its conscience slowly 
but surely awakening to a realizing sense of the 
evils of slavery, and, as the necessary result of free 
institutions, rapidly increasing in population and in 
wealth; and on the other side was the agricultural 
South, united as one man in resistance to what it 
regarded as a threatened invasion of its rights of 
property, and a menace of the horrors of a servile 
insurrection, repelling free immigration, and striving 
to build up additional bulwarks for slavery in the 
creation of new slave States. 

The Constitution having, as the price of union, 
exempted slavery in the States from federal inter- 
ference, the Territories became the theatre of the 
struggle for the balance of power. An ordinance 
of the confederation, confirmed in express terms by 
the First Congress, and recognized by the admission 
of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois as free States, had 
dedicated to freedom the territory north-west of the 



16 



Ohio river. The compromise of 1820 admitted Mis- 
souri as a slave State, and designated the parallel 
of 36° 30' as the dividing line between freedom and 
slavery in the remainder of the territory acquired 
from France by the treaty of 1803. The compro- 
mise of 1850 gave to the South a new fugitive 
slave law, intended to be more efficacious than the 
then existing law of 1793, and the organization of 
territorial governments in New Mexico and Utah, with 
the guarantee of the admission of those Territories 
as States " wdth or without slavery, as their respective 
constitutions might require," and secured to the North 
the prohibition of the domestic slave trade in the 
District of Columbia and the immediate admission of 
California as a free State. It was then hoped that 
the slavery question had ceased to be a practical is- 
sue in national politics, but this hope was not pos- 
sible of fulfillment, for the census of 1850 told the 
South that constitutional compact and legislative com- 
promise alike had failed to resist the aggressive force 
of free institutions, and that, in the struggle for the 
balance of power, the North had won. When the 
Constitution was formed, the free States and the 
slave States had been nearly equal in population and 
in political power, but before 1860 it had come to 
pass that there were eighteen free States with thirty- 
six votes in the Senate, one hundred and forty-seven 
votes in the House, and one hundred and eighty-three 
electoral votes, while there were but fifteen slave 
States, with thirty votes in the Senate, ninety votes 



17 

in the House, and one hundred and twenty electoral 
votes. Yet no amendment to the federal constitution 
could even then have been adopted in opposition to 
which the slave States had been united, for their 
relative strength was sufficient, not only to forbid 
the ratification of any such amendment, but also to 
prevent its preliminary approval by the Congress, 
and to prohibit the calling of a convention to con- 
sider any amendment whatever. Nor was the nu- 
merical inferiority of the South in representation 
in the Congress and in the electoral college of much 
practical importance so long as the united South 
should not be opposed by a united North. 

But in 1854 the dragon's teeth were sown broad- 
cast, that later were to spring up armed men, for, in 
that year, with the ostensible purpose of vindicating 
the inherent sovereignty of the people, whether ex- 
ercised by territorial or by State legislatures, but 
with a real and practical intent to regain, by the 
admission of new slave States, the lost supremacy of 
the South, the Missouri Compromise was repealed, and 
the Territories were thrown open to the invading 
march of slavery. But the doctrine of territorial 
autonomy, though originated by Northern Democrats, 
did not go far enough to satisfy the South, and it 
was promptly antagonized within the Democratic 
party by the assertion of the indefeasible right of 
the slave owner to hold slaves, as property, in all 
the Territories of the United States. As has so often 
been the case, extravagant demands upon the one side 



18 



were met by equally extravagant demands upon the 
other, and the Republican party signalized its entrance 
upon the stage of national politics by the declaration 
that all the Territories of the United States were ir- 
revocably dedicated to freedom.* Neither of the con- 
flicting doctrines could find adequate support in the 
Constitution, which, by its guarded recognition of slav- 
ery, defined it as the creature of State law and 
thereby localized its operation, and which had, in ex- 
press terms, empowered Congress to legislate for the 
Territories, nor in that governmental practice which 
had admitted Territories as free or slave States, ac- 
cording to the terms of their respective constitutions 
when accepted by Congress. Such were the issues 
raised for popular decision in the presidential contest 
of 1860, which resulted, for the first time in our his- 
tory, in the choice of a President who owed his elec- 
tion to Northern votes only. 

That memorable canvass found the country in an 
excited state of feeling which prohibited dispassion- 
ate consideration or calm discussion. Several causes 
had contributed to this result. 

Two days after the inauguration of Mr. Buchan- 
an, the Supreme Court of the United States had 
attempted, for the second time in its history, to de- 
termine by a judicial deliverance a question upon 

* If the Republican party had limited its declaration upon this subject to 
the assertion of the expediency of admitting no more slave States, it Avould 
have avoided just criticism, but its statement that the normal condition of 
all the Territories was that of freedom was neither historically accurate, nor 
well founded in constitutional law. 



19 

which political parties were at issue. In 1803, in 
the case of Marbury vs. Madison,* judges, who were 
Federalists, had endeavored to deprive the Demo- 
cratic party of those spoils of office which it re- 
garded as the fruits of its triumph over the Fed- 
eral party. In 1857, in the Dred Scott case,f 
judges, who were Democrats, sought to establish the 
indefeasible right of slavery to occupy the Terri- 
tories of the United States. The cases were alike, 
in that, in each instance, the court proved, to its 
own satisfaction, that it had no jurisdiction over the 
subject-matter of its decision, and that, in each in- 
stance, the country revolted against the attempted 
judicial usurpation of political functions. In the 
Dred Scott case the record raised severally the 
questions of the citizenship of a free negro, and of 
the effect upon, the status of a negro held to slavery 
under the laws of Missouri, of a removal to, and 
residence with, his master in the free State of Ill- 
inois and in the territory of Wisconsin north of the 
Missouri Compromise line. As the jurisdiction of 
the court was dependent upon the citizenship of the 
parties, it was not only incumbent upon the plain- 
tiff to maintain his averment of citizenship, but it 
was obligatory upon the court to find in his favour 
as to that, before it could express any other than 
an extra-judicial opinion upon the merits of the 
cause. In an hour, that was evil alike for the dig- 



* Reported in 1 Cranch, 137. 
t Reported in 19 Howard, 393. 



20 



nity and for the judicial reputation of the court and 
for the peace of the country, a majority of the 
judges of that high tribunal succeeded in convinc- 
ing themselves that they could, with judicial propri- 
ety and logical consistency, so determine the merits 
of a cause, of which they refused to take jurisdic- 
tion, as not only to conclude the parties to the liti- 
gation, but also to bind the conscience of the coun- 
try. The voluminous opinions of the judges who 
constituted the majority of the court, do more credit 
to their learning and to their industry than to their 
reasoning powers, and every argument which they 
put forward was more than answered in the master- 
ly dissenting opinion of Mr. Justice Curtis. They 
denied the citizenship of free negroes, although it is 
an historical fact that, in five of the thirteen orid- 
nal States, negroes were not only recognized as cit- 
izens but also admitted to the exercise of the right 
of suffrage, and, although many acts of Congress 
had by necessary implication recognized negroes as 
citizens. They declared the Missouri Compromise 
unconstitutional, upon the narrow ground that that 
clause in the Constitution which delegated to Con- 
gress the "power to dispose of and make all need- 
ful rules and regulations respecting the territory or 
other property belonging to the United States," 
could operate only upon such territory as the 
United States had when the Constitution was 
adopted, and that Congress could exercise over sub- 
sequently acquired territory no power which should 



21 

impair the right of slave owners to take their slaves 
into that territory and hold them there, and, in so 
deciding, they not only ignored the accepted con- 
struction of the Constitution, as settled by more 
than sixty years of unquestioned legislation, but 
they also gave to the purely municipal institution 
of slavery an extra-territorial force which was as 
foreign to public law as it was unwarranted by 
the most liberal construction of the Constitution. 
They disposed of the effect claimed by the plain- 
tiff for his residence on free soil, by treating it as 
a question, not of Illinois or of Wisconsin law, but of 
the effect which Missouri should give to that law, 
and they found the law of Missouri on that sub- 
ject, in a late decision of the Supreme Court of 
Missouri, which was at variance with many prior de- 
cisions of the same court, forgetting that they had but 
lately decided === that, while the courts of the United 
States do in general feel themselves bound to receive 
and adopt, without examination or further inquiry, 
that settled construction of the law of a State which 
has been established by its highest judicature, yet, 
where the decisions of a State court are not consist- 
ent, the courts of the United States do not feel 
bound to follow the last. 

The announcement of the judgment of the court 
failed of its intended pacificatory effect ; it impaired 
popular confidence in the independence and imparti- 
ality of the court; it destroyed all that remained 

» Pease vs. Peck, 18 Howard, 595. 



22 



of faith in the sanctity of political compromises ; and 
it added to the growing distrust of the peaceful solu- 
tion of the slavery problem. 

The repeal of the Missouri Compromise having 
renewed the anti-slavery agitation in its most dan- 
gerous form, by inviting a struggle in each Territory 
for the control of the territorial government in the 
interest of freedom or of slavery, that struggle was, in 
Kansas, not confined to the ordinary methods of 
political discussion, but was marked by riots and 
bloodshed, and the pro-slavery party obtained, by 
fraud and force, a complete control of the territorial 
organization, and thereby secured, under President 
Pierce's administration, such a recognition by the 
legislative department of the Federal Government as 
necessarily deprived Mr. Buchanan, when President, 
of all executive discretion in the matter. 

Those disgraceful disturbances, which have given 
to " bleeding Kansas " its unhappy fame, outraged 
the North; in 1859 the John Brown raid drove the 
South to the verge of madness ; and in 1860 the dis- 
ruption of the Democratic party, hopelessly divided 
by jealousies between its leaders and dissensions 
among their followers, and no less by irreconcilable 
differences of opinion as to the extension of slavery 
in the Territories, gave to the Bepublican party its 
first national victory. In the then temper of the 
public mind the popular verdict, though recorded 
with all the forms of law, could not be expected to 
receive the cheerful acquiescence of the defeated 



23 

party ; yet there could be no possible question as 
to the regularity of Mr. Lincoln's election, nor as 
to the validity of his title to the Presidency, nor 
was there in the triumph of the Republican party, 
apart from its abstract assertion of the essentially free 
character of all the Territories, any menace of revolu- 
tionary notion as against the South. Its platform 
had in express terms admitted the right of the 
States' to regulate, without federal interference, their 
domestic affairs; and, while it is true that the fet- 
ters of political platforms sit lightly upon party 
consciences, yet the South was not forced to rely 
upon the moderation of the victorious party, but 
was adequately protected against hostile action 
within the limits of the Constitution by the con- 
servatism of the great mass of people, and also 
against aggression beyond those limits by the con- 
ceded power of the Supreme Court to annul uncon- 
stitutional legislation. Never, therefore, was there 
greater madness than that of those misguided lead- 
ers of public opinion who raised the standard of re- 
bellion. No man among them, in his inmost heart, 
believed or hoped that the South would, by conquest, 
reduce the States of the North to the condition of 
subject provinces. The most that they expected or 
desired was, that the Southern States would suc- 
ceed in freeing themselves from the federal yoke. If 
they had so succeeded, no standing army would have 
been large enough to so thoroughly patrol the frontier 
separating them from the free States of the North 



24 



as to effectually prevent the escape of slaves, and no 
treaty between tlie South and the North stipulating 
for the rendition of the fugitives would, if such a 
treaty could have been negotiated and enforced, 
have been half as efficacious as even the fugitive 
slave law had been. The South, by successful re- 
bellion, could not possibly gain for slavery any greater 
immunity than that which the Constitution and the 
laws of the United States threw around it, and 
they would, with equal certainty, have lost by the 
termination of the federal compact that privilege of 
free trade between the North and South which, in 
economic value to them, far exceeded the conserva- 
tion of slavery. 

There was much in the past history of the country 
that tended to mislead the South. In each of the 
successive crises of the slavery question Southern 
threats of disunion had been met by Northern con- 
cessions, and upon each occasion the South had 
gained by compromise all that it demanded. The 
formation of the Constitution, the struggle in 1820 
over the admission of Missouri, the nullification con- 
troversy terminated by Mr. Clay's compromise tariff, 
the annexation of Texas, the war with Mexico, and 
the recent settlement of 1850, ratified by the triumph- 
ant election of President Pierce, might well convince 
superficial observers that Southern firmness would 
be encountered only by Northern weakness, but those 
who reasoned thus did not take into their considera- 
tion the fact that, for the first time in its history. 



25 



the South was confronted by a distinctively Northern 
party, with a defined policy, and emboldened by a 
national victory. 

It would have been, upon the part of the South- 
ern leaders, political wisdom to have recognized the 
fact that free immigration would effectually prevent 
the colonization and control of the Territories in the 
interest of slavery, and to have concentrated their 
efforts upon the maintenance within the Union of 
those constitutional guaranties, which more than ade- 
quately protected slavery in the States from federal 
interference. Had they done so, it is possible that 
the slavery question might have found its ultimate 
solution in a system of gradual and compensated 
emancipation, which, without revolution, or even social 
disturbance, would have made all the States free. 
Seventy years of strife had proven that no fugitive 
slave law ever could be practically enforceable in a 
free State, and if war had been averted there must, 
at no distant period, have been substituted for the 
rendition of fugitives from slavery the payment of 
a pecuniary compensation to their owners, and 
North and South, alike familiarized with the idea of 
compensation, and constantly irritated by its com- 
pulsory application to individual cases, would, ere 
long, have seen it to be to the common interest of 
the whole country to buy the freedom of all the 
slaves, and thus to terminate in peace that which 
ever had been, and ever would be, a cause of na- 
tional discord. But a peaceful solution of the problem 



26 



was not j^ossible of accomplishment, and it was 
fated that the sin and wrong of slavery should find 
their atonement only in blood ; for, in the South, mad- 
ness ruled the hour. The election of Mr. Lincoln 
was promptly followed by South Carolina's threat 
of secession, and the country, though it knew it not, 
was brought face to face with war. Neither North 
nor South had learned in their years of union to 
know each other, and, least of all, to realize that, 
under similar forms of government, the Southern 
States were, as they had been from the first, aris- 
tocracies, whose customs, more powerful than their 
laws, tended to the concentration of wealth and po- 
litical power in the hands of their leaders, while the 
Northern States had, by the growth of population, 
the development of trade and manufactures, and the 
more equal distribution of wealth, become democra- 
cies, in which he who would lead the people must 
first discover and formulate that which the people 
really desired. Therefore it was, that the North un- 
derestimated the rashness of the Southern leaders, 
and the power of those leaders to accomplish that 
which they threatened; while the South grievously 
miscalculated the loyal devotion of the people of the 
North to their government, and the strength of their 
determination to maintain the Union. 

No man who looks back to that gulf of blood 
which separates 1866 from 1860, into which North 
and South alike, with reckless prodigahty, threw 
down their treasure and the fairest of their youth. 



27 



can doubt that it was Mr. Buchanan's first and high- 
est duty, as President of the United States, to ex- 
ercise all the influence of his high office in order to 
secure, if it were possible, a peaceable adjustment 
of those differences, which, unadjusted, threatened 
civil war. That duty he fully and faithfully per- 
formed. He urged upon Congress the paramount ne- 
cessity of averting hostilities by reasonable measures 
of conciliation, and he pressed upon its considera- 
tion certain constitutional amendments, but no pacific 
settlement was possible. On the one side, the repeal 
of the Missouri Compromise and the deliverance of 
the judges of the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott 
case had destroyed popular faith in the stability of 
all compromises, however solemnly ratified, and how- 
ever long acquiesced in ; the rash and revolutionary 
action of the Southern leaders had prejudiced the 
North against any terms of concession to rebels in 
arms ; and, last, but not least, not until the shot had 
been fired at Sumter did the North believe in the 
reality of war. On the other hand, the leaders of 
rebellion were confident that secession would be ac- 
complished without serious opposition, and that the 
independence of the Southern States would be speedily 
recognized. For these reasons no plan of adjustment 
was possible of adoption, but that all such plans failed 
was certainly not the fault of Mr. Buchanan. 

The suppression of the rebellion has been followed 
by political and social changes, which are too great 
to be measured by constitutional amendments and 



28 



statutes, and, of all those changes, the greatest is 
that revolution in opinion which, working silently 
in the hearts of men and never formulated into 
law, has converted a confederation of States into 
a nation, whose Congress and whose President now 
exercise powers, and whose Supreme Court now an- 
nounces doctrines which Alexander Hamilton would 
have heartily approved. Verily, the whirligig of time 
has more than avenged the Federalists. Their theory 
of government, long despised of men, is now the ac- 
cepted construction ; and eighty years after their 
final expulsion from power, their doctrines have 
dominated the nation. But it was not so in 1861, nor 
had it been so at any time since Mr. Jefferson succeeded 
Mr. Adams in the Presidency. Mr. Buchanan's admin- 
istration is, therefore, to be judged not as Mr. Blaine 
judges it, by the standard of to-day, but by that jealous 
apportionment of power between the different depart- 
ments of the government which had been before 1861 
prescribed by law and recognized in practice. 

An absolute government, when confronted by rebel- 
lion, is limited in its action only by considerations of 
expediency, and by the sufficiency of its armed force 
for the suppression of that rebellion, but a constitu- 
tional, and especially a republican, government is 
also hampered by those organic restraints which in- 
terpose legal barriers to the exercise by the execu- 
tive of the whole power of the government. Pre- 
eminently was this true of the United States in 
1861, for its Constitution, framed to protect the lib- 



29 



erty of the citizen, and to prevent the exercise of 
arbitrary power by the government, had prescribed 
as the President's only legal function that of en- 
forcing, by the use of the means entrusted to him, 
obedience to the Constitution and the laws of 
Congress. It is clear, beyond the possibility of 
doubt, that Mr. Buchanan, however extensive might 
have been his lawful executive powers, and how- 
ever adequate the means at his command, would 
not have been justified, before the Presidential 
election of 1860, in taking any steps which could 
have been construed as the expression of an opinion 
upon the part of the executive, that the election of 
the Republican candidate would certainly, or even 
probably, be followed by rebellion in the South. 
Any such action would have been rightly regarded 
by the country as an endeavour upon the part of the 
administration to deter citizens from voting the Re- 
publican ticket, by rousing in their breasts the fear 
that the election of that ticket would necessarily be 
followed by civil war. It is equally clear also that, 
as no overt act was committed until more than a fort- 
night after Congress had convened in annual session, 
Mr. Buchanan would not have been justified in 
usurping powers which had not been vested in the 
executive. Neither the Constitution, nor any then 
subsisting legislation, had conferred upon the Presi- 
dent any authority to employ the regular army or 
navy, save in the defense of the Federal property, 
or to call out the militia for the suppression of 



30 

insurrection in any State, under circumstances such 
as then confronted him. The Constitution had, in- 
deed, in express terms, authorized Congress " to 
provide for calling forth the militia to execute the 
laws of the Union, suppress insurrections, and re- 
pel invasions," but Congress, in its delegation of 
that constitutional authority, had been so jealous of 
executive usurpation of the pov^er of the sword, 
that it had, by statutes of 1795 and 1807, em- 
powered the President to employ the army and 
navy in the suppression of insurrection within any 
State only " on application of the legislature of 
such State, or of the executive, when the legisla- 
ture cannot be convened/' or, in default of any such 
application, only in aid of the civil process of the 
Federal courts/^ It is obvious that this limited grant 
vested in the President no power that could be legal- 
ly used when, as in the then existing emergency, 
the executive and legislative authorities of South 
Carolina led the rebellion, and the resignation of 
the Federal judges and marshals had effectually pre- 
vented the issuing of any Federal process. 

Charleston harbour was, until after Mr. Buchanan's 
retirement, the only threatened point. Major Ander- 
son, who commanded Fort Sumter, had, with reiter- 
ated expressions of confidence, assert'ed the suffi- 
ciency of the force under his command for the suc- 

®The legislation of 1833, which had been passed to enable President 
Jackson to meet the nullification issue, vested certain powers in the Pres- 
ident, but only for a limited time, and that time had long since expired. 



31 

cessful defense of his post; and, not until the 
morning of Mr. Lincoln's inauguration, did Mr. Bu- 
chanan receive from Major Anderson any qualifica- 
tion of that assertion. The regular army of the 
United States numbered sixteen thousand officers 
and men, of whom only five companies, in all 
four hundred men, were available to reinforce the 
garrison in Fort Sumter, or to occupy the other 
forts and arsenals in the Southern States, the pres- 
ence of the rest of the army being imperatively re- 
quired on the Western frontier and the plains to 
hold the Indian tribes in check. Nor did the 
country possess any sufficient naval force. 

Mr. Buchanan might well suppose that the inad- 
equacy of the available military and naval forces of 
the government, and his legal inability to use them, 
or to levy additional forces, would not be of serious 
importance, in view of the fact that the Congress, 
who alone could authorize him to call out the 
militia, and who alone could appropriate the nec- 
essary money, would convene in annual session more 
than a fortnight before South Carolina could put 
into action its threat of rebellion, and would re- 
main in session during the remainder of his ad- 
ministration. He, therefore, in his annual message 
of 3d December, 1860, and in his special message 
of Sth January, 1861, fully disclosed to Congress 
the nature of the emergency, and explained his in- 
ability to cope with it unless larger powers were 
conferred upon him, but those powers Congress 



32 



failed to grant. That significant want of action by 
Congress was not due to any careless oversight, nor 
to any Democratic sympathy with rebellion, but it 
was the deliberate expression of that defined policy of 
the leaders of the Republican party which advisedly 
reserved, for the incoming administration, the adjust- 
ment of the pending national difficulties, and which 
carefully avoided any legislation, either in the direc- 
tion of conciliation or coercion, that might have a ten- 
dency to affect Mr. Lincoln's independence of action. 
That policy was, so far as it sought to postpone 
the consideration of terms of compromise until after 
Mr. Lincoln's inauguration, not only recommended 
by motives of party expediency, but also supported 
by higher considerations. For the country to buy, 
by concession, the peaceful inauguration of a Presi- 
dent who had been duly elected, was a dangerous 
precedent. The election of Mr. Lincoln had shown 
that the Democrats were in a minority in the North, 
and that that minority was far from unanimous. 
The Republicans, therefore, naturally insisted, not 
only that Mr. Lincoln should be peaceably inaugu- 
rated, but also that the negotiations should be con- 
ducted upon the part of the North by that party to 
whom the North had so decisively entrusted the 
responsibility of administration. But it may well be 
questioned whether it would not have been better to 
have armed Mr. Buchanan with the power of the 
sword, and thus to have impressed the South with 
the strength of Northern determination. But, how- 



33 

ever that may be, it does not become the Republican 
party to avoid its just responsibility for its Congres- 
sional inaction in 1861, and to seek to hold Mr. 
Buchanan responsible for not doing that which it refused 
to clothe him with power to effect. Unprovided with 
adequate means of coercion, and not permitted to under- 
take the accomplishment of a final and pacific adjust- 
ment of the national difliculties, it was clearly Mr. Bu- 
chanan's only duty to so administer the government 
during the brief remaining portion of his term that rebel- 
lion should be induced to stay its hand, that other 
Southern States should be, if possible, prevented from 
joining forces with South Carolina, and that Mr. Lin- 
coln should, in his administration of the government, be 
unhampered by any act or omission of his predecessor. 

Mr. Chase, afterwards the Secretary of the Treas- 
ury in Mr. Lincoln's Cabinet, put this vieAV forcibly 
in a letter,* which he wrote to Mr. Seward, on 11th 
January, 1801, in which he said: — 

" You are to be Secretary of State. * * * 
Let me urge you to give countenance to no scheme 
of compromise. Mr. Lincoln will be inaugurated in 
a few days. Then the Republicans will be charged 
with the responsibility of administration. Then, too, 
they will control one branch of the Government. To 
me it seems all important that no compromise be 
now made, and no concession involving any surren- 
der of principles; but that the people of the slave 



« Life and Public Services of Salmon Portland Chase, l.y J. W. Schuckers, 
page 202. 



34 



States, and of all the States, be plainly told that the 
Republicans have no proposition to make at present; 
that when they have the power they will be ready to 
offer an adjustment fair and beneficial to all sections 
of the country — that, in the meantime, all they ask of 
those who now have the power is, to uphold the Con- 
stitution, maintain the Union, and enforce the laws." 

This duty Mr. Buchanan took upon himself, and 
he performed it with unfaltering courage and un- 
swerving fidelity. Read in the light of this pur- 
pose, his words and his acts were as wise as they 
were consistent. His last annual message was ad- 
dressed to Congress, but intended as an appeal to 
his countrymen, both North and South. In it he 
conceded the existence of that right of revolution, 
which is the last recourse of a people oppressed by 
intolerable tyranny, and by whose exercise, in 1776, 
the independence of the United States was achieved, 
but he proved to the South that existing circum- 
stances did not justify revolution; * he demonstrated 
the logical fallacy and the practical folly of seces- 
sion ; with a clear appreciation of the complex char- 
acter of the Federal Government, which, while recog- 
nizing the autonomy of the States, yet compels the 
citizens of those States to obey the laws of the 

* Mr. Blaine, in criticising Mr. Buchanan's reference to tlie right of 
revolution, did not remember that Mr. Lincoln said, in his inaugural ad- 
dress, " This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who in- 
habit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they 
can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary 
right to dismember or overthrow it." 



35 

United States, he admitted the legal inability of the 
Federal Government to coerce the political action of, 
or to make war ujDon a State, but he as clearly assert- 
ed the right of the United States to defend its 
property and to maintain the supremacy of its laws, 
and the accuracy of this distinction was conceded 
by the official acts and declarations of the succeed- 
ing administration; he recommended that which he 
regarded as an equitable adjustment of the pending 
difficulties ; he threw upon Congress the responsibil- 
ity of legislation; and he exhorted the madmen of 
the hour to pause before they destroyed the Union. 
In his special message he again asked for power to 
act, and he again urged upon Congress the duty of 
adjustment. In his actions he made no concessions 
to rebels, he maintained the forces of the Union in 
Charleston and Pensacola harbours, he filled the va- 
cancies in his Cabinet by the appointment of officers 
whose loyalty was unquestionable, he sacrificed to his 
public duty his party affiliations and his personal 
friendships, and, on the 4th of March, 1861, he relin- 
quished the Presidency, having taken every wise pre- 
caution for the peaceable inauguration of Mr. Lincoln. 
Mr. Lincoln said in his inaugural address : " The 
power confided to me will be used to hold, occupy, 
and possess the property and places belonging to the 
Government, and to collect the duties and imposts ; 
but, beyond what may be but necessary for these 
objects, there will be no invasion, no using of force 
against or among the people anywhere. Where hos- 



36 

tility to the United States in any interior locality shall 
be so great and universal as to prevent competent res- 
ident citizens from holding the Federal offices, there 
will be no attempt to force obnoxious strangers among 
the peoj)le for that object. While the strict legal right 
may exist in the Government to enforce the exercise of 
these offices, the attempt to do so would be so irritat- 
ing, and so nearly impracticable withal, I deem it better 
to forego, for the time, the uses of such offices. 

" The mails, unless repelled, will continue to be 
furnished in all parts of the Union. So far as pos- 
sible, the people everywhere shall have that sense of 
perfect security which is most favourable to calm 
thought and reflection. The course here indicated 
will be followed, unless current events and experi- 
ence shall show a modification or change to be proper, 
and in every case and exigency my best discretion 
will be exercised according to circumstances actually 
existing, and with a view and a hope of a peaceful 
solution of the national troubles, and the restoration 
of fraternal sympathies and affections." Mr. Seward, 
then the Secretary of State in Mr, Lincoln's Cabinet, 
said in a dispatch * addressed to Mr. Adams, then in 
London, and dated but two days before the bombard- 
ment of Sumter, " the President on the one hand will 
not suffer the Federal authority to fall into abeyance, 
nor will he on the other hand aggravate existing evils 
by attempts at coercion which must assume the form 
of direct war against any of the revolutionary States." 

* Quoted by Mr. Curtis, Vol. II. page 351. 



37 

By these official declarations Mr. Lincoln and Mr. 
Seward announced as the policy of the Republican 
administration a course of action which cannot be 
distinguished from that which Mr. Buchanan had laid 
down for himself and to which he had consistently ad- 
hered. There can, therefore, be no condemnation of Mr. 
Buchanan for lack of determination, or want of action, in 
his dealing with rebellion, which does not equally cen- 
sure Mr. Lincoln and his Republican administration. 

Mr. Buchanan brought to the discharge of the 
duties of the Presidency, maturity of judgment, 
a long and intimate acquaintance with the prac- 
tical workings of the Federal Government, a wide 
and varied knowledge of men and of afMrs, and 
an earnest determination to do his duty. It was 
but natural that his age, his conservatism of tem- 
perament, and his political training, should induce 
him to condemn both Northern and Southern ex- 
tremists, and to find, in the strict enforcement of 
constitutional obligations, an adequate remedy for all 
existing evils. That which Mr. Blaine has character- 
ized as Mr. Buchanan's timidity, was only the cau- 
tion wliich was the necessary effect of his intelHgent 
appreciation of the gravity of the crisis, his con- 
scientious sense of official responsibility, and his ac- 
curate perception of the legal limitations upon his ex- 
ecutive action. Nor do the facts sustain the distinc- 
tion which Mr. Blaine seeks to draw between the 
Mr. Buchanan of December, 1860, and the Mr. 
Buchanan of January, 1861, and which attributes to 



the influence of Judge Black a radical change in the 
policy of the administration. It was not likely that, 
after forty years of conspicuous public service, Mr. 
Buchanan would have permitted his judgment to be 
controlled or his action to be dictated by his cabinet 
officers, who were, Judge Black not excepted, as in- 
ferior to him in intellectual attainments as they 
were lacking in official experience. This conclusion, 
in itself so inherently probable, is more than con- 
firmed by the facts, which prove that Mr. Buchanan 
was in all respects and at all times the responsible 
chief of his own administration, and that its policy 
was shaped in accordance with his, and not others', 
convictions of his public duty. Nor in reality was 
there any change in the policy of Mr. Buchanan's ad- 
ministration after December, 1860. Mr. Buchanan's 
last annual message was framed after full consultation 
with his attorney-general, and those portions of the 
message to which Mr. Blaine most strongly takes ex- 
ception only express in another form the views which 
Judge Black had stated a few days before in an 
official opinion, which Mr. Curtis prints in full. 

Mr. Blaine's criticism is only destructive. He 
neither does, nor can, suggest any course of action 
upon Mr. Buchanan's part, which would, in fact, 
have averted war. The appeal to arms was the 
culmination of an embittered sectional controversy 
of more than seventy years' duration, and the inevi- 
table result of the effort to unite opposing political 
forces under one government. Mr. Buchanan was 



39 



armed neither with the power of the purse, nor with 
that of the sword. Under such conditions, threaten- 
ings of authority and persuasions to peace were 
alike useless, and attempts at coercion would have 
been both irritating and ineffective. 

In the United States an ex-President is relegated 
to a position of insignificance. His political career 
and his party influence are ended. He can no 
longer reward his friends nor punish his enemies. 
His personal and official triumphs are alike forgot- 
ten. Those whom he appointed to office do not 
remember him, for with most men gratitude for 
favours granted is an emotion of a transient and 
feeble character, while in every village there are 
those who never forget that he slighted their fan- 
cied claims to political preferment. Mr. Buchanan 
not only suffered the slights and endured the con- 
tumely to which all ex-Presidents of the United 
States are subjected, but he was also the victim of 
calumny and injustice to a greater extent, by reason 
of the peculiar circumstances of his retirement. 
The Democratic party of the Northern States, shorn 
of the prestige of office, dispirited by the victory 
of its opponents at the polls, discredited by the 
participation of its Southern allies with rebellion, and 
hopelessly divided by dissensions between those of 
its members who, in the hour of the nation's peril, 
subordinated their party fealty to their civic duty, and 
those other of its members who ranked party above 
country, was in no condition to render effectual sup- 



40 

port to any man. On the other hand, the Repub- 
lican party, then represented in the executive and 
legislative departments of the Government by com- 
paratively new and untried men, and called with an 
empty treasury, with shattered national credit, and 
without a standing army to confront the South in 
armed rebellion, was ready to hold the retiring ad- 
ministration responsible for all the difficulties with 
which its successors were compelled to grapple. It 
is not surprising, under these circumstances, that 
during the clash of arms, and even after the war 
had ended, but while the passions which the conflict 
had excited were 3^et raging, that that which might fairly 
be urged in Mr. Buchanan's defence, should have failed 
to receive due consideration; but now, Avhen nearly 
twenty years have passed away, since the irresistible 
logic of Appomattox closed the debate which had been 
opened at Sumter, it ought to be possible for the 
American people to discard political prejudice, and in 
the calm exercise of a passionless judgment, to do that 
justice to the memory of one of their dead Presidents 
which they denied to him while living. 

The truth of history is of greater importance than 
the glorification of any political party. The fair fame 
of a statesman is the common inheritance of his 
countrymen. It is, therefore, to the best interest of 
all. North and South, Republicans and Democrats 
alike, that the sober second thought of the country 
should not stamp with its judgment of approval Mr. 
Blaine's mistaken view of the crisis of 1861. 



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